JPM

A CITY ON MARS - Review I'm enjoying reading this book, which is particularly insightful regarding any planned hopes to place a human on Mars, or, with the overly-ambitious dream of a human settlement. However, I do find the constantly references to the joint authors, a man and wife team, constantly and with great boring repetition self-identifying as geeks and nerds. Is the ambition to settle on the Moon (likely) and on Mars (extremely unlikely) only the preserve of geeks? I similarly was a bit put off by the silly sketches that accompanied the telling and the constant quips of one or both of the authors. It’s difficult to tell as they both seem to be joined at the hip in their thinking, with no counter-arguments between them. A match made on Mars, then, if not made in Heaven. I also found the notes at the bottom to be constantly as intrusive as the quips. But, that said, all in all a really insightful examination as to why we will not settle on Mars anytime in this millennia. We may just, at a combined thrust, make it to a settlement on the Moon. No quips. No footnotes. No silly sketches needed. Five stars reduced to four.

BEYOND – Stephen Walker Published by William Collins, this fantastic book tells the epic tale of the first human being to leave the planet Earth. The young man chosen: a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, is still in his Twenties. This top-secret mission is played out during the Cold War between East and West, and with it the Bay of Pigs disastrous invasion in Cuba, which went spectacularly wrong for America. So, this was a double-whammy to its standing in the world. That the Russians managed to pull off such a top-secret coup met with absolute shock, awe and amazement around the globe. However, within the confines of the White House, a new president, John F. Kennedy, plots America’s next move. But that’s at the end of this quite thrilling book; throughout which writer Stephen Walker hits the highest limits with this tale of daring-do. Proving himself to be a writer of extraordinary ability. History, drama, laughter, tears, it’s all here. Back on planet Earth, as the lowly first lieutenant lands, he is immediately bumped up two steps to major. But no one, not even his wife and family, know that he is the brave cosmonaut, the first human in space. Until he lands. Having pulled it off, his hero Gagarin, leaving the Mercury 7 American astronauts in his shadow, finds that life will never be the same again. Literally by being the first to be blasted off the planet into space, the moment he lands he becomes the most famous human in the universe. A shock to not only himself, but his wife, and father and mother too. And the American astronauts who knew they could have beaten him. If only... Having been alone in space, the diminutive Gagarin has no space into which he can ever be alone - ever again. But what Walker reminds us of is that it was the darkness surrounding the event of getting there that also needed to be told. And he does the telling truthfully. On the Russian side, besides technicians and a cosmonaut, many dogs and other animals were sacrificed to study the unknown effects of space-flight on their bodies. Whilst America sacrificed the lives and minds of Chimpanzees; casually exploited in acts that did not make America any better. A very low point in the history of space flight, and one that we must hope is never repeated by any technologically advanced nation in future. Ever. Then there is the unknown Russian behind this epic adventure. Anatoly Kirillov is the genius in a stable of communists. Whilst on that other side called democracy, we have a team of ex-Nazi scientists headed by - the follow any regime as long as it gets me there - Wernher von Braun. But the story, as they say, doesn’t end there. And neither will it with this epic page-turner. It’s simply the blueprint of a saga that is crying out to be made into a documentary, a tv drama, and major movie. Hopefully in the Russian language. It is after all, a game of cat and mouse, or astronauts v cosmonauts. That and the persons who put them there. A blast from the past. And a must read.